One common task required for the maintenance, repair, improvement, or beautification of surfaces, most notably walls, ceilings, floors, trim, or furniture surfaces, is painting. Those skilled in the art of painting use a variety of tools to apply paint to surfaces. One common tool known to the art for rapidly painting relatively flat surfaces is a paint roller. Generally, a paint roller consists of a roller cover and a roller frame. A roller cover is a cylindrical, relatively rigid tube open on one or both ends, comprising a substrate covered with a surface known to those skilled in the art as a nap. The nap is selected to absorb paint and then evenly apply it when rolled over a relatively flat surface. Common nap materials include foams, including rubber foams, and fabrics, including pile fabrics. Roller covers have two standard inner diameters, 1.5 inches and 1.75 inches, and are offered in a variety of different lengths. Common lengths include four inches, seven inches, nine inches, twelve inches, fourteen inches, and eighteen inches. A roller frame is a structure, typically wire, with a handle at one end and a tubular framework at the other end to fit inside of a roller cover, retain it by friction fit, and allow the roller cover to rotate and spin when in use. Typically, a roller frame will have an approximately ninety-degree bend between the handle end and the tubular end for ease of use. Roller frames generally include an integral or connected handle, and the tubular end is provided in diameters and lengths corresponding to the common diameters and lengths of roller covers. To use a paint roller, a painter slides the roller cover over a correspondingly-sized roller frame, wets the roller cover with paint, and, using the roller frame, rolls the roller cover along a surface to be painted.
During use of a paint roller, paint typically penetrates deeply into the nap. Although roller covers are commonly designed to be reusable, they are difficult to clean sufficiently to make them desirable for re-use. Roller covers are particularly difficult to clean thoroughly enough to allow their subsequent use to apply different colors, finishes, or styles of paint without undesirable mixing between the earlier- and later-applied products, or without dried residual paint degrading the consistency of application of new paint from the nap. Methods of cleaning a roller cover known to the art include scraping the nap along an edge, such as an edge of a paint can. Due to the roller cover's cylindrical shape, the roller cover must be rotated slightly after each section is scraped to enable cleaning of the entire nap. Once the entire nap has been scraped, it is typically still necessary to wash and scrub the roller cover to remove residual paint. The roller cover is then allowed to air dry. This known method of cleaning paint rollers has a number of disadvantages. Most notably, it is messy and unreasonably time consuming, particularly for a professional painter.
Another method of roller cover cleaning known to the art is to submerge the roller cover in a cleaning solution, typically water, and to move, spin, or agitate the roller cover while submerged to cause the removal of paint. This method of cleaning is, like scraping, unduly time consuming to perform by hand. Further, this method is typically not effective to remove paint from a roller cover without undue effort unless the scraping method described above is first used to remove excess paint from the nap.
Devices known to the art, such as hand-operated spinners, exist to aid with the rotation or agitation of a submerged roller cover for cleaning. These devices are relatively ineffective, however, and do not spin or agitate the roller cover at sufficient speeds to otter any meaningful advantage in time or effort compared to hand rotation. It is also known to the art to use a power drill and an adapter to spin a roller cover during submersion, such as by use of the apparatus described in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2010/0252077. The device described in the '077 Publication consists of a rod receivable by a motorized drill, the rod attached to a square tuning fork-shaped member, where the tines of the fork are flexible and are spaced to correspond to the interior diameter of a roller cover. A roller cover can be slid over the tines, forcing the tines to flex inward, and the apparatus can be attached to a drill to allow rapid rotation of the apparatus. This apparatus suffers a number of disadvantages. Notably, over time, the ability of this apparatus to securely retain a roller cover during use will degrade as the tines weaken from repeated flexion. Due, for example, to the design characteristic of the flexion of the tines, this apparatus inherently provides little to no support to the interior of a roller cover at the end opposite the base of the forks, and further provides little to no support to areas of the interior of the roller cover not directly adjacent to a time regardless of where located along the length of the roller cover. After repeated uses, this lack of support will likely cause degradation or damage to the unsupported portions of the roller cover, making this prior art apparatus unsuitable for use in connection with the scraping method of cleaning. Further, the design of this apparatus permits significant slippage of a roller cover when the device is in use, such slippage being particularly likely if the apparatus is used with a drill at high speed, and such slippage being likely to lead to abrasion or damage to the interior of the roller cover. Such slippage would further reduce the efficiency of the apparatus for cleaning using the submersion method. An improved apparatus is needed to assist with paint roller cleaning. Desirable traits for an improved apparatus would include increased durability in the face ore repeated use, and offering support to greater portions of the interior of a paint roller cover.